372 In his _De Abstinentia Carnis_. The controversy between Origen and Celsus furnishes us with a very curious illustration of the extravagances into which some Pagans of the third century fell about animals. Celsus objected to the Christian doctrine about the position of men in the universe, that many of the animals were at least the equals of men both in reason, religious feeling, and knowledge. (Orig. _Cont. Cels._ lib. iv.) 373 These views are chiefly defended in his two tracts on eating flesh. Plutarch has also recurred to the subject, incidentally, in several other works, especially in a very beautiful passage in his _Life of Marcus Cato_. 374 See, for example, a striking passage in Clem. Alex. _Strom._ lib. ii. St. Clement imagines Pythagoras had borrowed his sentiments on this subject from Moses. 375 There is, I believe, no record of any wild beast combats existing among the Jews, and the rabbinical writers have been remarkable for the great emphasis with which they inculcated the duty of kindness to animals. See some passages from them, cited in Wollaston, _Religion of Nature_, sec. ii., note. Maimonides believed in a future life for animals, to recompense them for their sufferings here. (Bayle, _Dict._ art, “Rorarius D.”) There is a curious collection of the opinions of different writers on this last point in a little book called the _Rights of Animals_, by William Drummond (London, 1838), pp. 197-205. 376 Thus St. Paul (1 Cor. ix. 9) turned aside the precept, “Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn,” from its natural meaning, with the contemptuous question, “Doth God take care for oxen?” 377 I have taken these illustrations from the collection of hermit literature in Rosweyde, from different volumes of the Bollandists, from the _Dialogues_ of Sulpicius Severus, and from what is perhaps the most interesting of all collections of saintly legends, Colgan’s _Acta Sanctorum Hiberniæ_. M. Alfred Maury, in his most valuable work, _Légendes pieuses du Moyen Age_, has examined minutely the part played by animals in symbolising virtues and vices, and has shown the way in which the same incidents were repeated, with slight variations, in different legends. M. de Montalembert has devoted what is probably the most beautiful chapter of his _Moines d’Occident_ (“Les Moines et la Nature”) to the relations of monks to the animal world; but the numerous legends he cites are all, with one or two exceptions, different from those I have given. 378 Chateaubriand speaks, however (_Études historiques_, étude vime, 1re partie), of an old Gallic law, forbidding to throw a stone at an ox attached to the plough, or to make its yoke too tight.